---Ideas I had while pondering how the Dark Sun metaplot could be saved---
Free Year 91,
Eighty years have passed since the Great Earthquake rocked the Tablelands of Tyr.
The Dragon has descended to earth and sits enthroned astride the mighty realm of Raam. His armies of Dray and Priests of Transfiguration seek always to expand his influence. Great machines of war creep ever closer to Urik, Nibenay, and Draj, impeded by the desperate maneuvers of Humanu the Lion and his crack army. The Tablelands know war as they have not known it in ages.
Tyr’s liberating heroes are long dead—but for Sadira, who yet leads her faction of preservers within the OverCouncil, and who some say is the new sorcerer queen of Tyr. The city is not well. It’s outlying lands suffer greatly from the cruelty of giants and the depredations of raiders, while a privileged hereditary caste of freedmen tyrannizes the city, and the old Tyrian elite schemes to return to the ‘glory days’ of Kalak.
In Gulg, the Oba’s star has waxed. With Raam, Urik, Nibenay, and Draj at war, and her peer-challengers in Balic and Tyr long vanished, the agents of the Oba dominate the central tablelands. From the fortress of Altaruk, her templars tax the Great Road, the Trade Road, and the People’s Road, while granting exemptions to those who swear devotion to the forest goddess and her ideology to renew the woodlands of Athas. The trade houses of the Tablelands increasingly espouse the Oba’s doctrine and are more and more willing serve her interests; her informants are everywhere.
In Draj, a cadre of psions under the aging prophet Atzetuk rule a brittle but growing realm. Their blood soaked cult of sacrifice is gone, and the Moon Priests—now psions, not templars—preach ascetic submission to Tectuktitlay the redeemer. Spanning villages and oases across the Tablelands, their foremost doctrine is resistance to the Dragon’s cult of Transfiguration and its mutation of human beings into reptilian Dray.
But beyond geopolitics, threats new and old benight the region.
A new terror emanates from the Salt Meres of Bodach. Hordes of shambling dead ambush travelers from the Estuary of the Forked Tongue to the Bay of Maray. In daylight, they lie in wait beneath the sands and, in moonlight, hordes of them prowl silently for victims to consume. None know what drives these dead, or how so many of them can pour forth from a single ruined city.
Meanwhile, the shores of the Silt Sea now seem to swarm with pirates, who abduct all victims they find. It is rumored that a pirate king from the Silt Archipelago now dominates Waverly, Lake Island, and Dragon’s Palate.
And as always in Athas, the wasteland expands ever wider, banishing hope and civilization to yet fewer points of light. The once great city of Balic and its dependencies along the Trade Road are gone, laid low by giants and civil strife. South of the walls of Altaruk, only villages and ruins remain.
------
This Darksun setup would take place 80 years after the Prism Pentad but would downplay the events of that series, be ambiguous about what really happened, and potentially ignore elements of the Pentad. It would use the 4e map with the 75 mile key because the societies of the Tyr region are more plausible/verisimilar at this larger scale. Some things the time jump does are:
I would love it if any of you were willing to 'yes and' the premise of a time jump to 80 years after the Prism Pentad, either with your own ideas or expanding on mine. I also have more ideas that I will add to the thread gradually.
I know WotC is not going to revisit this setting, but you're welcome to opine on that here if you like.
Please, though, do not argue about Dark Sun's presentation of slavery here. That has been repeatedly argued over elsewhere and is not a good use of your or my limited time on earth.
Free Year 91,
Eighty years have passed since the Great Earthquake rocked the Tablelands of Tyr.
The Dragon has descended to earth and sits enthroned astride the mighty realm of Raam. His armies of Dray and Priests of Transfiguration seek always to expand his influence. Great machines of war creep ever closer to Urik, Nibenay, and Draj, impeded by the desperate maneuvers of Humanu the Lion and his crack army. The Tablelands know war as they have not known it in ages.
Tyr’s liberating heroes are long dead—but for Sadira, who yet leads her faction of preservers within the OverCouncil, and who some say is the new sorcerer queen of Tyr. The city is not well. It’s outlying lands suffer greatly from the cruelty of giants and the depredations of raiders, while a privileged hereditary caste of freedmen tyrannizes the city, and the old Tyrian elite schemes to return to the ‘glory days’ of Kalak.
In Gulg, the Oba’s star has waxed. With Raam, Urik, Nibenay, and Draj at war, and her peer-challengers in Balic and Tyr long vanished, the agents of the Oba dominate the central tablelands. From the fortress of Altaruk, her templars tax the Great Road, the Trade Road, and the People’s Road, while granting exemptions to those who swear devotion to the forest goddess and her ideology to renew the woodlands of Athas. The trade houses of the Tablelands increasingly espouse the Oba’s doctrine and are more and more willing serve her interests; her informants are everywhere.
In Draj, a cadre of psions under the aging prophet Atzetuk rule a brittle but growing realm. Their blood soaked cult of sacrifice is gone, and the Moon Priests—now psions, not templars—preach ascetic submission to Tectuktitlay the redeemer. Spanning villages and oases across the Tablelands, their foremost doctrine is resistance to the Dragon’s cult of Transfiguration and its mutation of human beings into reptilian Dray.
But beyond geopolitics, threats new and old benight the region.
A new terror emanates from the Salt Meres of Bodach. Hordes of shambling dead ambush travelers from the Estuary of the Forked Tongue to the Bay of Maray. In daylight, they lie in wait beneath the sands and, in moonlight, hordes of them prowl silently for victims to consume. None know what drives these dead, or how so many of them can pour forth from a single ruined city.
Meanwhile, the shores of the Silt Sea now seem to swarm with pirates, who abduct all victims they find. It is rumored that a pirate king from the Silt Archipelago now dominates Waverly, Lake Island, and Dragon’s Palate.
And as always in Athas, the wasteland expands ever wider, banishing hope and civilization to yet fewer points of light. The once great city of Balic and its dependencies along the Trade Road are gone, laid low by giants and civil strife. South of the walls of Altaruk, only villages and ruins remain.
------
This Darksun setup would take place 80 years after the Prism Pentad but would downplay the events of that series, be ambiguous about what really happened, and potentially ignore elements of the Pentad. It would use the 4e map with the 75 mile key because the societies of the Tyr region are more plausible/verisimilar at this larger scale. Some things the time jump does are:
- Except Sadira, the heroes of Tyr are long dead and their history has been rewritten by the factions that outlived them.
- Few people know what happened to the sorcerer kings who are gone. Abalach-Re is known to have been killed in conflict with Tyr, but Andropinis and Tectuktitlay simply disappeared. There are many rumors and speculations about what might have happened but, ultimately, life in the wasteland goes on without them.
- Cerulean storm—almost nobody knows that it’s there or why it’s there, and it has diminished substantially in size and potency over time. The destructive Tyr storms it causes still go somewhere in the tablelands about once a month, which is too irregular to sustain agriculture anywhere but makes the wastes slightly more livable for people and wildlife in aggregate.
- The dragon is gone and no longer takes a slave levy, but when Dregoth reemerged most people interpreted him to be the dragon—so the mystery to them is why the dragon has ended the levy and siezed a city in the tablelands now.
- Dregoth publicly conceals his undeath. Those who have witnessed his undead nature—outside his dray inner circle—still think Dregoth is the dragon, speculating that the dragon was always like this, that the dragon has been degenerated by its own defiling magic, that some event seriously injured the dragon causing it to seek protection behind the walls of Raam, or they simply don’t question it.
- The end of the dragon’s levy has done a lot to help the region maintain a stable population.
- The quakes and the great earthquake after the death of Rajaat are over, the great one is still remembered because it’s damage is still visible in the monuments of the cities—but if the earthquakes opened the great rift, no one knows/talks about it and it doesn’t matter to the Tyr region.
I would love it if any of you were willing to 'yes and' the premise of a time jump to 80 years after the Prism Pentad, either with your own ideas or expanding on mine. I also have more ideas that I will add to the thread gradually.
I know WotC is not going to revisit this setting, but you're welcome to opine on that here if you like.
Please, though, do not argue about Dark Sun's presentation of slavery here. That has been repeatedly argued over elsewhere and is not a good use of your or my limited time on earth.